Howard’s Agony: Seems Like We’ve Been Here Before

~~By Grail Guardian

Howard Dean is at it again. Yep. There’s a You Tube video entitled the “Agony of the Women of 2008” (posted 11/15/08) of “Dean The Scream” on C-Span 2’s post-election “Presidential Election Analysis” by Smithsonian Associates. There he is decrying the rampant sexism in this year’s Presidential campaign. (H/T to “imustprotest” for the link.  Updated Editor’s Note: The You Tube video is from BettyJean Kling at Free Us Now–see blogroll)

As if he’s been screaming about it for years, Dean states:

“Washington doesn’t get it. They always get it last. This is the most underwritten story of this campaign… by the press… by the media.”

“Women my age, in m generation felt this really acutely. Because they were the ones that suffered all of the indignities that you suffer when you fight to win the battle for equality. As they did.”

“Nobody understood the agony that women, particularly of my generation, were undergoing about this…issue…and to this day, it has been swept under the rug and been forgotten because she didn’t win.”

Say what? Did Mr. Misogyny just say that the media screwed women?

“We thought we were past all this stuff and we weren’t. We weren’t surprised about the degree of racism or lack of it or whatever, that was endlessly examined. We did not examine the fact that we didn’t get, we haven’t gotten nearly as far ahead as we thought we were about equality between the sexes. And that ought to be revisited as a result of what happened.”

But wait, it gets even better! Coward goes on to defend… wait for it… Sarah Palin!

…and it happened to Sarah Palin too. All the stuff that happened to Sarah Palin, and I know God knows I don’t have a lot of sympathy for her political points of view, but a lot of the stuff that happened to her, as she pointed out, would not have happened had she been a man.”

Holy Toledo, Batman!

Is this the same Howard Dean that says he was slow to pick up on the sexism against Senator Clinton in the primaries because he doesn’t watch cable TV? Is this the same Howard Dean that asked Cynthia Ruccia of Women for Fair Politics “What sexism?” Or could it be the same Howard Dean that decried the media’s treatment of Hillary Clinton in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos near the end of the Democratic Primaries, too late to do anyone any good?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me bring up another point on unifying the party. Geraldine Ferraro wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe this week where she talked about the persistent — what she’s saying is sexism — in the party and the difficulty that Barack Obama is going to have winning over Reagan democrats. Let me show — here’s a portion of what she wrote. She said that “Reagan democrats see Obama’s playing the race card throughout the campaign and no one calling him for it as frightening. They’re not upset with Obama because he’s black. They’re upset because they don’t expect to be treated fairly because they’re white. It’s not racism that’s driving them, it’s racial resentment, and that is in force because they don’t believe he understands them and their problems.” She’s talking about a deep breach. What does Senator Obama —

DEAN: Well, first of all, I’m not going to respond to Senator — I mean to Geraldine Ferraro’s views on race because I think they have been outside the mainstream and unhelpful. But I will respond —

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you are responding to them.

DEAN: No, but I will respond to something she said on sexism. There has been enormous amount of sexism in this campaign on the part of the media, including the mainstream media. We’ll leave present company excepted because I think that’s true. But there have been major networks that have featured numerous outrageous comments that if the words were reversed and they were about race the people would have been fired. So that’s a big issue. And there are a lot of women in this country who — there’s two issues here. One is one candidate is ahead and one is not. That happens all the time in primaries, and you get over that. What you don’t get over is deep wounds that have been inflicted on somebody because they happen to be a woman running for President of the United States.

Hmmmmm. Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? But I can’t seem to recall Dean saying a single word about the obnoxious tactics used by the Obama campaign against Sarah Palin until after the election when it’s too late to do anyone any good. Wow, didn’t I just say that? Yep. I’ll say something else that I said at the time Dean made the first statement:

Howard, you are a coward, an idiot, and a liar. I can only pray that you are soon relegated back to the pages of history as the screaming lunatic you’ve proven yourself to be.